Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011 - rees2009

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in activities and no involvement have been shown to lead to unethical behavior, so cocurricular
involvement must be properly balanced with academic expectations.
Findings also suggest an inverse relationship between ethical reasoning and satisfaction
with ethics education – students who have higher levels of ethical reasoning are less likely
to be satisfied with their ethics instruction (Holsapple, et al., 2011). In fact, it appears that
students in lower-level classes actually respond negatively to being overexposed to ethics
curricula. This may suggest that students early in their engineering curriculum are not yet
properly versed in the field to truly absorb and apply the information presented in ethics
discussions. One possible explanation for the inverse relationship is that students who
have higher levels of ethical reasoning are more likely to apply more nuanced approaches
to ethical dilemmas. These students may be dissatisfied with ethics instruction that
focuses on memorizing codes and rules rather than addressing complex areas of ethical
dilemmas. This was reinforced by the qualitative data that revealed very little awareness
by all groups (administrators, faculty and students) that ethics was a developmental issue.
Finally, for the three output variables, there was little correlation between academic
dishonesty and reasoning or academic dishonesty and ethical knowledge. In other words,
academic integrity could not be linked to higher ethical reasoning or ethical knowledge
based on the measures used in this study. There is a mild positive correlation between
ethical reasoning and knowledge. We found that students who were able to reason
through ethical dilemmas based on the DIT2 did score higher on the ethics knowledge
section of the assessment.
Recommendations and Future Research
Purposeful and meaningful engineering ethics education is not easy, but is necessary to
prepare our graduates for the future of engineering, which will be more technologically
advanced and integrated. We recommend establishing a common vocabulary for ethics
across campus constituents and designing a curriculum that spreads ethics education
across the duration of the degree program. However, the curriculum should focus on
ethical decision-making at appropriate developmental levels. We also recommend
promoting co-curricular involvement through service programs and professional
organizations. Involving students in the right experiences can facilitate ethical growth.
Future research plans include analyzing the current SEED dataset to test subgroup
differences (i.e. student characteristics such as race, gender, major, etc.) for relationships
between input variables and ethical development. In addition, most analysis to date has
been either qualitative or quantitative. A mixed methods approach of analyzing the data is
currently underway and appears to be meaningful in building our understanding of
engineering learning Finally, a limitation of this holistic assessment was that data
collection was cross-sectional. While cross-sectional data allows for correlational analysis
of the relationships between students’ previous experiences and their current levels of
ethical reasoning, a longitudinal analysis allows for insight into the potential causal
relationships between curricular experiences and student outcomes. We hope to
transition this investigation into a longitudinal study. Future data collection could also
Proceedings of Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011
Madrid, 4 th - 7 th October 2011